In 1989 football coach Jim White (Kevin Costner) lost his job at a high school for losing his temper and throwing a shoe at a kid. It wasn’t the first time. He is hired by the high school in McFarland, CA, in California’s central valley, as the assistant coach and life science teacher despite the principal’s (Valente Rodriguez) hesitation. When White and his wife Cheryl (Maria Bello) and two daughters Julie (Morgan Saylor) and Jamie (Elsie Fisher) arrive in McFarland they are very unsure they wan … [Read more...]

In John Sexton’s passionate book about the game of baseball, “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game: Seeing Beyond the Game” (Gotham/Penguin, 2013), he describes the mysticism of the game in perfectly accessible terms:“Baseball, as it turns out, can help us develop the capacity to see through to another, sacred space. Indeed, the more we come to appreciate the sport’s intricacies and evocative power, the clearer it is that it shares much with what we traditionally ha … [Read more...]